Tornado

Scottish Katana

Tornado
Directed by John Maclean
UK 2025
Tea House Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage in this one folks.

Well let’s jump right in here then.

The British Isles, 1790... presumably somewhere in Scotland, which is where Tornado was shot. Tim Roth plays bad guy Sugarman, who has a small bunch of hoodlums with him.. and they have just stolen a lot of gold from a local church. He seems to be well known and unchallenged in the various small communities dotted around the area local to the forest, where the film’s title character is running from him... so I would assume he also collects protection money from those nearby. Also, he has a very casual and no nonsense way about dealing out death, which is presumably something else the locals know. 

Indeed, the film starts off with the film’s central protagonist Tornado, played by Kôki, running from him and his gang, while also being kept an eye on by a young boy. It’s during this opening when we see Sugarman casually and quickly slit the throat of one of his own men as he passes on by him, which is obviously done to create a certain shorthand tension within the audience as to his character but, as it later turns out through way of a back story flashback, also makes a bit more sense later on. Because Tornado has stolen the gold from the young boy, who originally stole it from Sugarman’s thieves. And now the two are being hounded by them in a narrative which, probably lasts for only 24 hours at most, including the contents of that back story. Tornado’s father (played by Takehiro Hira) is killed while he was trying to protect her and now she is trying to get distance and shelter from Sugarman, before she then goes on to avenge her father’s death. 

And that’s all I want to say about the specific story set up but, I will say that this film, the first Scottish samurai film that I personally know of, had me before even the first visual image of the story came on screen. And this is because the film starts off with an on screen, typographic quotation of an extract from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky. Now, Arseny’s son, who was outlived by his father by three years, is my second favourite movie director Andrei Tarkovsky, so I figured that if the movie has anything like the beauty and poetry of the younger Tarkovsky’s works, well then I was in for a treat.

And I really was, it turns out. 

The film is lensed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan and, I have to say the whole thing looks absolutely stunning. Beautiful colours and locations shot in such a way that the frames just pop out. In the opening shots of Tornado trying to find a way to somewhere where she can hide, the films uses a lot of things seen between the camera and the principle actors, such as branches and tree trunks etc, which really gives the shots some depth. And all shot on 35mm film rather than just digitally, which is a treat in itself and would go some way to explaining why the thing looks so darn good. 

The colours, too, as I mentioned earlier, are terrific. One wonderful sequence, for example, where Tornado’s small caravan has been set ablaze by Roth’s crew, has the inners of it burning a wonderful yellow/orange while the forest canopy and dark blue night sky envelope it. Just spectacular artistry. 

There’s some beautiful foreshadowing going on too. Such as the travelling puppet show put on by Tornado and her father, depicting a samurai fight with some proper gore and splatter coming out of the marionettes themselves... as limbs and a head are sliced off. This, of course, foreshadows the fight scenes between the avenging Tornado and her antagonists towards the end of the picture, when things have taken a turn. 

And as if to doff the cap to samurai director extraordinaire Akira Kurosawa, this director acknowledges Kurosawa’s own influences of the American westerns of John Ford on his samurai films by having a very lethal bad guy dressed in, pretty much, the kind of outfit you would find in a specific style of Western. During scenes such as these the violence, which has been relatively held back and kept in check until now, catches up to the kind of visceral carnage foreshadowed in the puppet show earlier on in the film. 

One beautiful piece of action choreography, for example, features Tornado duelling with the cowboy dude while another bad guy on the floor is trying to painstakingly reload his flintlock pistol... all the while the fight is in progress. As soon as Tornado sees he has finally reloaded his weapon, she twists around and slices off his arm, which lands on the ground still gripping the pistol... then, as the muscles of the severed arm tighten, the flintlock discharges its load into the other guy she was fighting... really nice stuff.  

Another interesting sequence, where Sugarman’s gang have invaded a mansion house where Tornado is hiding, has one of the gang sitting down to play the piano and this is an interesting incident of the non-diegetic music doubling up as diegetic soundtrack for the film. This is just before the actual soundtrack of the film is properly introduced which, again, is absolutely stunning work, this time by Jed Kurzel who is a composer I’ve not been all that fond of in the past but, yeah, this one is absolutely beautiful. And I think, if I’m not much mistaken (but, you know, I might be) that the score also makes good use of my second favourite instrument the cimbalom so... yeah. A shame this score hasn’t been released on CD, for sure. It would be getting quite a few spins in my player right now. 

And added to all this, along with some wonderful editing, is some amazing acting. Even from supporting actors such as the always magnificent Joanne Whalley. But Time Roth is especially good in this, paring down on the words and using his facial expressions and attitude to really bring a sense of gravitas to the situation. This is especially well capped off in the final... let’s call it a ‘showdown’... between Sugarman and Tornado, which was funnily enough, almost exactly what I’d imagined it would be but, the way the scene plays out is absolutely wonderful and so, I can’t begrudge the lack of surprise in terms of the final denouement, so to speak. 

The film also continues in the spirit of Kurosawa (and Tarantino in a scene in Kill Bill Part One, which I imagine must be inspired by Yojimbo), when Tornado lets one of the gang off the hook and allows him to leave with his life (a tactic she also tries a little earlier in the film, with a much bloodier outcome). 

And that’s me done on what is, honestly, one of the best movies I’ve seen all year. Tornado is an absolute masterpiece as far as I’m concerned and I will be lining up for the Blu Ray the first week it gets released (fingers crossed it gets one because I’m having to buy an awful lot of unauthorised Blu Rays from other countries these days, to compensate for the inability of the studios to realise that physical media is actually the best way for their consumers to catch this stuff). I need to see this one again soon, I think. 

Night Life Of The Gods

Apollo’s Creed

Night Life Of The Gods 
Directed by Lowell Sherman
USA 1935
DVD Region 0

Warning: Full on spoilers.

“Once upon a time, a famous author named Thorne Smith wrote a book, conceived in a moment of delirium, and written in a cuckoo clock, the first chapters convinced us He was crazy. The ensuing left no doubt that possibly WE were. So we leave you to enjoy this new and completely mad type of whimsical humor on the screen.

Stop rattling cellophane! Take Sonny's shoes off! Park your gum under the seat where it belongs, and let's all go crazy together.”
Foreword from the movie version of Night Life Of The Gods

Just a quick dash of a smidgeon of a short review for what was, up until relatively recently (I believe) thought of as a lost film. That is to say, the movie adaptation of Thorne Smith’s Night Life Of The Gods. Dead at the age of 42, one year before this movie was made, Smith was a famous and much loved contemporary humourist who wrote a number of books and collections which tackled booze, sex and society in a comedic and witty manner. Night Life Of The Gods is certainly one of his best remembered but two of his other novels, Topper and Topper Takes A Trip, are perhaps even more known works, both of which were the basis for the first two of three Topper films in the 1930s and 40s, followed by a popular spin off TV show and, in later decades, various other TV films and shows which were less successful.

Now I said above that this movie version of Night Life Of The Gods was thought to be lost, certainly according to a book I’ve recently been reading which was revised around about ten years ago. Well, it must have turned up somewhere but I am surprised that such a title has not, since its rediscovery, had a proper DVD or Blu Ray restoration since its ‘found’ status. As such, I have been forced to take the ‘underground’ route and have acquired a ‘copy’ from that sometimes great resource for ‘unreleased and consigned to the scrapheap for good’ movies... eBay. 

So here I am and... I can understand in some way why this one has not been polished up for a modern audience. The foreword, which I have duplicated in its entirety at the start of this page, is somewhat off putting but it shows how ‘less than confident’ the producers were about putting this somewhat unusual concoction before the general public in the first place. Yeah, let’s tell them it’s crazy in case they don’t enter into the spirit of the thing, right? Not to mention using the horrible US spelling of the word humour, of course.

Okay, so I’ve no idea if this measures up to the original novel (nope, I haven’t read it but I should probably read this author’s works at some stage, he’s one of my dad’s favourite writers) but the plot is about an inventor called Hunter Hawk, played by Alan Mowbray and his crazy explosions which leave his family, who all live in the same house as him, somewhat nervous... and perhaps hopeful that he might die in one of his own explosions and leave them all his money. 

After he is knocked unconscious in his laboratory, pretty much the rest of the movie takes place in his dream. He invents a machine, which he can wear as a ring, which turns people into stone statues and, I have to say, it’s a power used a lot and looks particularly good when shown on screen... especially for a 1935 movie but, perhaps even for modern times. However, the ring can also bring the stone back to flesh but, more so, it can bring statues to life and so, in the usual drunken adventures which are possibly a signature of a Thorne Smith protagonist, Hawk and his friend bring to life the statues of the Gods, such as Apollo (played here by the great serial and b-movie player Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, billed under his real name of Raymond Benard), Neptune and Diana... and they all go on drunken revelries around the city, pursued by the police and leaving a trail of chaos behind them. 

Now, it’s not a bad film by any means... one particular moment, where Bacchus (as played here by George Hassell) is getting a massage and then decides to neck down the massage oil as there is no suitable alcohol around, certainly tickled me. But, the film does feel somewhat like it’s in the mode of that special kind of chaotic humour you would find in an early Marx Brothers movie... without having the benefit of Groucho, Harpo, Chico... or even Zeppo... present to give the shenanigans that special ingredient. That being said, bearing in mind audiences were already used to and loving Minie’s boys* by this point in their career, I am somewhat puzzled as to why Universal thought they needed that wordy and somewhat cringeworthy opening foreword to introduce the proceedings.

I mean, it’s not terrible but, it’s not terribly good either. The saving grace is, perhaps, that everyone seems really invested in their role and Alan Mowbray certainly seems to be taking things very seriously indeed. And at the start, Hawk seems downright sinister but it’s tempered by Mowbray’s performance once the wine induced hijinks are underway, for sure. 

And there I am with a longer review than I’d expected to be able to write and nothing much more to say about this one other than... while the costumes and scantily clad nature of them seem more appropriate to the pre-code days of Hollywood, which ended only the year before, the modesty of all the actors and actresses here is kept firmly intact. 

Would I recommend Night Life Of The Gods, in terms of the movie version. Well it’s certainly not for everybody but I think such a film, which is somewhat different from most of the other stuff being pumped out by the major studios at the time, certainly deserves a modern audience. I don’t think it will necessarily win any big fans but it’s certainly something which I feel should be seen by people, nevertheless. So, yeah, I would kind of recommend it to various shades of cinephile, actually.

*The Marx Brothers

M3GAN 2.0

M3ganomaniac

M3GAN 2.0
aka Mthreegan Two Point Zero
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
USA/Canada/New Zealand 2023
Universal/Blumhouse

Warning: Some pretty big tonal spoilerage here. 

Like many people, I quite enjoyed the first M3GAN movie (reviewed here) but, even though it was clearly left open for a sequel, I was kinda worried it would just end up being a rehash of the first. Especially since it was green lit so quickly after the popularity of the first movie (within two weeks of release I believe). My fears seemed justified when it came to the trailers for this new installment in the franchise, M3GAN 2.0, because it looked pretty awful and like it was going to fall exactly into that same writing trap. 

Not often has a trailer been so misleading and, I suspect, it was cut like that deliberately, to keep the expectations of the audience from the first movie on board with the sequel. In fact, from what I could make out, some of the trailer was even manipulated to give it a different vibe to what the movie is, with one line of dialogue coming from a totally different version of a specific character, for example... and certain other lines not making it into the movie at all. Marvel do this kind of thing all the time these days and the trailer looks like it was clearly shaped to withhold certain information about specific scenes.

Okay, so the surviving cast of characters from the last movie are all back... with Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps... and, of course, Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as the body and voice of M3GAN respectively. We also have a new threat... not just to those characters but, to the entire world, in the form of a kind of adult version of the titular character called Amelia, played really wonderfully by Ivanna Sakhno. And the fact that she is... not quite the villain but certainly working against M3GAN and her human companions (if you want to call them that)... certainly changes the dynamic of the picture.

Here’s the thing... this film is not just a rehash of the first movie on steroids. I mean, sure, M3GAN does have a totally killer dance sequence and she even gets to sing a song (this time it’s a cover version of the truly beautiful Kate Bush song This Woman’s Work) to hit some of the right tonal notes with fans of the first. But this is very different, for sure. The first movie was a sci-fi tinged horror film and, while there is still the tension of the ‘will she, wont she turn against us all again’ variety, when it comes to the title character...this movie goes full on into a sci-fi tinged action adventure yarn. And by that I mean it leans full on into the action which reminded me of nothing less than the Mission Impossible franchise in a lot of sequences (it even has a planned heist sequence at one point). That being said, the violence gets pretty gory in this movie, with impalements and arm ripping just for starters.

Now, the one bad thing about the movie is... when it comes to the identity of the real villain of the piece, well... I’m sure most audiences, like me, would have figured it out in the first 20 minutes of the movie, with the expected twist reveal itself held until the third act, so to speak. However, lack of surprises aside, it’s still all executed pretty well and I have to forgive it that blatant telegraphing.

There are some wonderful quirky bits to this too. For example, when the conciousness of M3GAN hops into a really nice car, the soundtrack goes into the theme from the old David Hasselhoff TV show Knight Rider. And one of the murders committed by the assassin Amelia is a clever, modern, cyberpunk twist on the serial killer murders in Michael Powell’s 1960s career killing movie Peeping Tom.

But yeah, this one goes full on with the action sequences and, contrary to the atmosphere in the first movie, you will probably find yourself rooting for M3GAN by the end of the tale, I would think. An ending which, of course, sets things up for the possibility of another sequel.

So I think that’s me done with M3GAN 2.0 and, I have to say I really liked it... more so even than the first one. And I especially liked the ‘Allison Williams unconscious in an exo-skeleton’ fight scene, which reminded me more than just a little of the fight sequences at the end of the excellent Malignant from 2021 (reviewed here) but, I can’t tell you why. That’s one spoiler too far, I think. But, yeah, this one feels like a M3GAN meets Charlie’s Angels mash up and, I was certainly here for it. Roll on part 3.0 is what I say.

Psycho Sex Dolls

Doll Reaver

Psycho Sex Dolls
Written & Directed by David Wilde
UK 2025
Wilde Entertainment
Blu Ray Region 0

I jumped on board the kickstarter for this new movie by David Wilde fairly late in the game and I’d be lying if I said it was anything other than the bevy of gorgeous ladies on the posters combined with a very marketable title that attracted me to click on the pledge button. That being said, now I’ve seen the end product I’m rather glad I did. 

The basic plot set up to Psycho Sex Dolls, in a nutshell, is that an obnoxious porn photographer/video maker, Damien Self (played so brilliantly by Simon Weir), is losing money for his even less likeable boss James Steel (played by Kieran Chalker) and is given a week to come up with something fresh and innovative to bring new life into Steel’s failing porn empire. In addition to this, his top model Mia, played by a very interesting actress called Stella Paris, has walked out on him because, in the horrible digital age in which we live, most models can shoot, produce and upload their own content. 

After a week of drug fuelled attempts to get some script ideas together and get back some of his old models with no results… “I got giant tits done for you and they exploded!”… Damien resorts to an invite he got given to be a beta tester for a new, powerful and fully lifelike, AI enhanced series of customisable sex dolls... and he orders three. One is a deliberate copy of Mia and the other two are Chloe (played by Jamie L. Jones) and Sophie (played by Emma Cole). And it very quickly becomes clear that these uninhibited robots are the answer to his prayers when it comes to shooting new movies but also, it later turns out, writing and editing the porn content they are churning out. But the leader of the three sex dolls, Mia, is a slightly more advanced model than the others and she’s learning and making various judgements by herself, which could lead to trouble for some... at the end of a knife or a bullet, perhaps.

And it’s actually a fine film. Not quite what I’d expected but certainly a refreshing movie. It is, of course, as I mentioned in my recent review of Black Eyed Susan (you can read that one here) one of a number of movies made in the recent trend of adult sex doll tales but, it’s still a relatively small subgenre at present and this one explores its story in some style and is, again, a little different to some of the others.

Now, since I started this blog and had requests from young, independent UK directors eager to show their work (this one wasn’t a request by the way… I gravitated towards the product myself, not the other way around), I’ve seen my fair share of barely clinging together movies, sometimes of dubious quality. They come in three basic shapes… badly told with bad quality production values, pretty good with equally bad production values and, this kind... well crafted with some pretty good production values. So this one does look a whole lot more professional than some (not all) of the modern, microbudget UK indies I’ve seen over the course of the last 15 years or so.

Now, fair warning and as the title suggests… the film is pretty sleazy. But, for me, it felt like the kind of British sleazy I would associate with late 1980s/eary 1990s British sex shop era porn but, actually there to help fuel a story which happens to be set in that kind of industry as it is now. So there was almost a nostalgia rush involved for me, in a way. And there’s also some real character development here…

I mean, I was astonished to find that, even though he’s technically a poor excuse for a human being in some ways, I found myself mellowing and quite liking Damien after a while, actually rooting for him by the end. I hope he returns in the sequel. Similarly, by the end of the film, Mia’s basic internal chemistry has undergone a transformation and she’s evolved into something... perhaps someone... not totally evil or out for herself but an almost fair minded, if still bloodthirsty individual. She even has a moment towards the end which indicates she is perhaps developing her own emotional responses. Which I was totally there for.

The film starts off with a lot of frantic hand held camerawork and I was worried for a while that this and the mish mash look of different film stock styles were being edited in to cover up a possible lack of coverage in a few areas but, it’s not the case and the cinematography becomes more steady and fluid when required. It soon became apparent that these jolting collisions of styles were deliberate choices and were, one might say, even Godardian in their motive. I've not seen anything else directed by this guy as yet so it might well be a signature flourish, perhaps. And there are some nice ideas worked into the sleazy coating of the story which make this more than what you might at first be expecting (although there’s plenty of that stuff too). Such as the male lead conversing with is inner demons via a mirror.

And the film is quite funny in places too, with a very anti-woke nature. I mean, it’s not going to be for everyone (I work in an office with a very young team and they would be in an uproar about some of this dialogue) but, again, it’s refreshing to be able to watch something like this without wading through all that ‘triggering sensitivity’ tightrope walking. I’m sure the writer/director makes no apologies for lines like “Busty Big Brother. That sounds a bit tranny.” And it’s all quite entertaining it has to be said, especially in some of the porn movie parody parts such as the production of Spring Ball Breakers and the iconic Kubrickian flourishes lavished on A Cockwork Orgy. 

So, yeah, I have to say I was surprised at many things in this movie. The main male and female leads really inhabit their characters in a three dimensional way and it’s an entertaining yarn which will lead straight into a sequel as part of a planned franchise. So as soon as I finished watching this one, I rushed over to kickstarter to help fund the sequel, The Dolls, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidwilde66/the-dolls-0 and, if you want to catch up with this first movie, then you can watch it in various ways and places with some details on the film’s home page here.

So summing up, Psycho Sex Dolls is not a film I’d recommend to everybody but, I certainly think about half of my friends would enjoy it and I had a pretty good time with it myself. Roll on the next one, I can't wait!

The Inspector Wears Skirts

 

The Skirty Dozen

The Inspector Wears Skirts
aka Ba wong fa
Hong Kong 1988 
Directed by Wellson Chin
Golden Harvest 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

The Inspector Wears Skirts (the first one, at least) is a pretty entertaining slice of Hong Kong action cinema, produced by Jackie Chan and initially top lining Sibelle Hu in the first instance, who is really good in this one. Sometime during the production, the producers didn’t think it was working out all that well so they added Cynthia Rothrock into the cast, already making a name for herself in Hong Kong before she conquered the American market... and she turns up in the absolutely brilliant opening sequence, where she and Hu take on a bunch of terrorists... and then is brought in for the third reel for a section of training sequences and the big scene to catch out some lethal diamond robbers at the end. I think she’d already gone to America by the time of the first sequel to this one so, as far as I know, she doesn’t turn up in the other three films.

After the opening sequence, which is one of the best action scenes in the movie, the Hong King police decide to put Sibelle Hu’s character Madam Wu in charge of a new, special unit of female police officers, known as SKIRTS (no acronym origins of the codename are given because, you know, Cantonese to English translation is probably not doable in terms of getting it to make sense in English), who she will train up to help support the male police force when needed for special assignments. And this is when the film turns into Police Academy for a good long while, as Wu trains her band of recruits like an army drill sergeant and these sections and the inevitable ‘battle of the sexes’ between the male and female cadets are played for laughs a lot of the time. And, if you’re not familiar with the style of Hong Kong movies during this period of their cinema... the comedy is played very broadly with a lot of crudity and slapstick, it seems to me. It’s not all to my taste, I have to admit but, like most comedy, some of it hits and some of it definitely misses. 

And then Cynthia Rothrock’s character, Madam Law, is brought back to take an even tougher training stance with the girls and then, when both the male and female units are despatched undercover to a fashion show to protect the jewellery... well... somewhat predictably, it’s the gals who save the day with a nicely put together series of creatively choreographed fight scenes, which are all pretty entertaining. 

And, helpfully, the various cadets played by the likes of Regina Kent and Ann Bridgewater all play likeable characters who the audience can, at least, sorta relate to and, luckily, are all doing some good action work here too. Although, with some of the male leads... I could have perhaps done without the song and dance number, truth be told. 

The editing is quite good in this too, asides from the normal action editing... where the timing has to be just right. In one scene, for instance, after one of the male police cadets has taken part in a drinking competition with one of the girls, he passes out and starts to fall to the floor. This cuts then to a new scene which starts off with a bang of an explosion, timed perfectly to when the guy’s head in the previous shot would have hit the floor. Giving the previous sequence a kind of audio/visual punctuation period point (or full stop as we call it here in the UK). 

Another stand out thing is the score... which perhaps stands out for some of the wrong reasons but it seems appropriate to the comic undertones of the whole thing. So, yeah, the score for this one by Noel Quinlan (who I only know from The Man From Hong Kong... reviewed by me at some point in the future... it’s in the pile, okay?) like the comedy content of the film, is not exactly subtle or clever but, unfortunately for me, it’s quite an infectious ear worm of a cheesy synth-pop main theme which helps give some of the scenes a certain buoyancy, it has to be said.

And I think that’s me about done on the first The Inspector Wears Skirts film. I didn’t know what to expect from this and I’m pleased to say that I liked it just fine (to the point where I’m going to have to go and buy all the sequels, which have fortunately now been released over here by the same company in the UK) and I’m still hearing that annoyingly catchy theme tune in my head... more’s the pity. So, yeah, expect some other reviews of similar films to follow this one soonest. 

28 Years Later

Jimmy Fixes It 
For The Infected

28 Years Later
Directed by Danny Boyle
UK/USA 2025
Columbia
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Big spoilers. Avoid reading until you’ve seen it.

28 Years Later is, of course, the sequel to both 28 Days Later and its follow up, 28 Weeks Later. The first was a very popular retake on the zombie apocalypse genre but with the zombies replaced by RAGE virus infected killer humans and it had a strong opening which was quite similar to John Wyndham’s novel (and various adaptations of) The Day Of The Triffids. I would say the first two thirds of that movie were pretty good but it all, for me, kind of runs out of steam when you get to the military presence in the last third. I loved the second film though, even if it was more of a traditional style entry into that specific sub-genre... I just don’t remember a whole lot about it, truth be told. 

This third installment, made some 23 years after the first installment and, once more by the same director working with writer Alex Garland, is not just a sequel to those movies but also the first part of a new trilogy of 28 Years Later themed films, the second of which is rumoured to star the main lead of the first movie (the then unknown Cillian Murphy) and is currently to be released in January of next year.

And it’s a pretty good, actually. It has a strong opening where a bunch of kids try to ignore that the house they live in is being overrun by zombies as they watch the Teletubbies on television, somewhere around the time of the first outbreak... and the movie, which then jumps the 28 years later to the main setting, harkens back to this cold open at the very end of the tale. 

The main lead for the remainder being a 12 year old boy called Spike, played brilliantly throughout by Alfie Williams. The film is a game of two halves followed by a left of field prologue sequence. In sequence one it’s made clear, with some mostly credible retconning, that the UK is the only place where the infected remained. The UK is therefore a quarantine zone to the rest of the world, the shores patrolled by boats from other countries to make sure nobody tries to escape the British Isles. Spike lives in a small village compound separated from the mainland by a causeway which is only accessible when the tide is low... and yeah, that’s an obvious plot device for bad timing when running from hordes of RAGE infected zombies, for sure. 

Spike is taken to the mainland by his father, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, to get his first ‘zombie kills’ as a kind of rites of passage. And this is where the one thing which is wrong with this movie comes into play... people stupidly putting themselves in completely stupid situations and making stupid decisions for the sake of a taught and intense series of frightening scenes. And, yeah, the film is quite intense and bleak, more so in the first half hour than in any other part of the movie, I would say... as Spike and his father barely make it back to their village in one piece. 

The second main section involves more stupidity as Spike escapes from the village with his mum, played brilliantly by the great Jodie Comer, in order to seek out a Hearts Of Darkness Kurtz like character who was once a doctor and, of whom, evidence is found that he still lives (due to Spike and his dad observing a fire in the distance when they were hiding from the infected). Jodie Comer’s character Isla keeps having strange, delusionary episodes and, sometimes mistakes Spike for her father. However, when they do find the doctor, played by the great Ralph Fiennes, he diagnoses brain cancer and informs them she hasn’t got long to live. You can probably guess what happens next. 

And it’s a quite gruelling film for the first half an hour, for sure... and there are some beautiful shots in it. The cinematography looks like a gazillion dollars which is why I am suitably shocked and impressed to find the whole movie was shot on an iPhone... because it does look like an epic, it has to be said. Not to mention some great artistic choices such as the 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s 1903 poem Boots used to chilling effect (as it also is in the trailer) and the use of the Lawrence Olivier version of Henry V to further push certain metaphors. 

The second journey out to find the doctor is still quite action packed but I would say it’s more about the visual poetry of the story rather than the fright factor... although there are certainly some unsettling scenes to be had from this second expedition outside the relative safety of the compound. 

And then we get to the end sequence which... I really feel I need to talk about. Spoilers... you don’t want to know. 

So Spike makes a decision, after delivering a newborn baby back to his home. A newborn but uninfected baby which is birthed by a zombie... from when Spike’s mum helps said zombie out, in terms of the delivery. And the decision he comes to is to stay outside and take his chances in the world of the infected. However, it’s not long before he finds himself cornered by a load of RAGE infected, fast zombies. And then, in the film's third or fourth example of unlikely deux ex machina, he’s saved by a group of blonde haired... well. 

Okay... 

So this ending reminded me of the kind of satirical edge that 2000AD comic used to get into trouble for in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In a bizarre twist, this group of people, who I thought at, first were supposed to be blonde, Swedish death-metal fans and who beat up and kill the zombies with what seems to be almost superhuman strength and agility... are something which I think some members of the British audience may find a little triggering. They’re all dressed in roughly the same way, with track suits, lots of jewellery and white/blonde hair which may or may not be wigs. But it was only when the leader (who I think is supposed to be the grown up version of the main Teletubbies watching kid in the film’s prologue) puts his ring laden hand out to Spike and says, “I’m Jimmy, let’s be pals.” that I realised I was observing a cult of people who based themselves on Jimmy Saville. 

Now, it has to be said, that since the first movie was set contemporary to its release, these later installments are taking place in an alternative timeline of the UK. So, what makes the Jimmy Saville thing an even more curious choice is the fact that, in this timeline, his various crimes had not yet seen the light of day in public. So it is a very unusual choice, especially since it seems to imply that the next part, directed by Nia DaCosta (who did a great job on The Marvels, reviewed here, as far as I’m concerned), will be picking up the story directly after this one. 

And that’s me done with 28 Years Later, I think. A pretty good movie and an unexpected sequel after all this time (I was still waiting for a 28 Months Later, myself). Worth catching at the cinema, if you want to be impressed with what an iPhone can somehow capture, I would say. 

Shining Sex

Sex Shooter

Shining Sex
Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland 
1976 Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Kind of spoilers... I guess. It’s basically just sex.

Okay then... this is probably going to end up being a really short review. Shining Sex is a movie by Jess Franco I’d not heard of before. I do like the director a lot but find his films hit and miss... usually they hover between absolute masterpiece classics such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here) to... almost unwatchable stuff like Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or his not so great Fu Manchu films (reviewed here and here). Now, the only reason I bought this beautiful Severin restoration of Shining Sex is because there is also a CD in here presenting the first part of a compilation of cuts from Jess Franco soundtracks (many of which I don’t have on other CD compilations) so, yeah, even if I never watched the film it was still a good buy for me. 

However, I did watch the movie and... well... it really is just a sex movie to be honest. Nice to look at but it’s almost non-stop sex going between different locations and a surprisingly small amount of dialogue. It looks nice and if you want to see as much of Franco’s girlfriend (later wife) and second muse Lina Romany as it’s possible to capture on a camera which doesn’t actually enter a person’s body, then you’re in the right place. And she is fine in this.

The entire plot, as it is, will reveal everything here. Lina plays Cynthia, who works in a nightclub doing her special (not so special) strip show entitled Shining Sex. A strange couple pick her up after the act and she takes them back to her place to do sexy business. But it’s clear there is something strange up with them. The woman, Alpha (played by Evelyne Scott) is a bit unused to sex and a bit bitey. Her partner Andros (played by Raymond Hardy) doesn’t have much to offer in terms of sparkling conversation either. They sex up Cynthia and rub a special ointment on her which causes her body ecstacy but also turns her, unwittingly, into a killing machine (much like the lips of death kiss in one of Franco’s Fu Manchu movies). Alpha is really a being from another dimension and Andros her brain washed slave (in some readings he’s her robot... although his erect member seems less mechanical to be honest... I haven’t seen the French language edition of the film but it’s possible the term robot is used in the original sense of the word as ‘slave’?).  They send Cynthia out, using telepathic control signals, to kill humans who are onto the fact that there are beings from another dimension in our reality... to sex them up and kill them with the poison her body has absorbed. 

There’s also a bizarre sub plot with Jess Franco as Dr. Seward (presumably named after the one in Dracula) as he has a psychic connection with Alpha whenever Cynthia does sexing... or something... it’s all a bit loose. We see Cynthia sex a few people to death and then her body succumbs to the ravages of the ointment/virus thingy and she dies herself. The end... nothing more to see here folks. 

It looks nice and there are many trade mark Jess Franco zooms if that’s your kind of thing... lots of zooms in and out of Romay’s hairless labia and other such fleshy visions are on offer here. And the decor in some of the interiors is pretty cool and made me think of some of his earlier films. Not too much else to say about this one though, to be honest. The last 20 minute sequence takes place in Africa (or somewhere like it) and it really doesn’t need to. I know Franco shot this with the same cast in the same ten days that he also shot a movie called Midnight Party so, perhaps that movie called for an African sequence (or, as likely, since it’s Franco we’re talking about, perhaps he was also shooting bits for this while he was making a third movie in the same period). It doesn’t add or detract fro the plot, such as it is... just gives us a refreshing change of landscape at some point. 

Despite the lovely Lina and various actresses getting naked and frisky for the director, I found this... not a hard watch exactly but I did find myself almost dozing off in a couple of places. It’s more the extras to this wonderful Severin set which are the big draw. The score CD was always going to be the thing for me but there are some nice interviews on the second disc plus, again if this is your thing, almost a quarter of an hour of outtakes which didn’t make it into the movie... comprised totally of close ups of various vaginas as they are being licked or of cocks being similarly stimulated. Maybe this would make a good back drop, projected onto the wall at a party but, yeah, it’s all a bit samey, to be honest. 

That being said, it’s not a terrible film from a technical level and I’m genuinely pleased I saw it. I will continue to seek out another Franco here and there (I still have his House Of Lost Women to watch, which I bought for the inclusion of the second volume of the CD soundtrack compilations) but I would say that, unless you are a Franco completest (and that’s probably not a bad thing to be... although challenging because of the amount of movies he made and their current availability) then I would say Shining Sex is probably something you could live without, to be honest. 

Without Knowing Anything About Her

Assisted Development

Without Knowing 
Anything About Her
aka Senza Sapere 
Niente Di Lei
aka Unknown Woman
Italy 1969 Directed by Luigi Comencini
Conway Films DVD Region 0

Warning: Full on spoilers of the slight plot and ending.

Back around 2002, a new Italian soundtrack CD label started up called Digitmovies. They’re still going but they don’t seem to have as much presence on the market as when they first started, it seems to me. One of the scores I bought from them in either the first or second year of their existence was a beautiful Ennio Morricone score for a film I’d never seen called Senza Sapere Niente Di Lei, which translates into Without Knowing Anything About Her and, from that moment on, it was in my CD player all the time for a good long while. It soon became one of my all time favourite Morricone scores, in fact... even though it’s quite minimal in content and had to be bolstered up by four tracks from an unrealised project on the same disc (which are also great, as it happens). I looked around to find the film but never could until, a recent* purchase of a disc of admittedly dubious origins. I don’t think this has had a proper subtitled commercial release alas. But it certainly needs the Blu Ray treatment because, honestly, it turns out that this is a truly beautiful and enthralling movie, even though not a heck of a lot happens. 

It’s been touted by many as a giallo and, well, it’s not what we think of as a cinematic variant of the giallo film today for sure. This is another one which came out in that little five or so year period, just after Mario Bava had made a couple of giallo and just before Dario Argento cemented the stylistic tropes and the genre exploded on the big screen... and like films of that ilk such as The Sweet Body Of Deborah (reviewed here) and A Black Veil For Lisa (reviewed here), it’s more an echo of the original literary forms of giallo which were touted by publishers like Mondadori back in those days. So, I’m not taking a side on this one but if you’re expecting black gloved killers and lurid deaths then, you won’t find anything like that here.

Instead, what we have is a film where almost nothing happens at all but it’s just wonderful. It deals with an insurance investigator Nanni (played by Philippe Leroy) who is trying to prove that a woman who has died committed suicide, so his company won’t have to make a big pay out to the family (which is a plot you find a lot in these kinds of film and especially noir thrillers, although this movie is based on a novel, La morale privata by Antonio Leonviola). Before anything can be properly contested, though, he has to track down the youngest of the woman’s three daughters so all the family can be present. However, when he finally catches up with Cinzia (played by Paola Pitagora), the two fall in love and end up sleeping together. Alas, when Cinzia finds out he’s an investigator into her mother’s insurance claim, she slits her wrists in her bath. After Nanni nurses her back to health, the two continue thier love affair but things get a bit dark when, finally, she confesses to him that she actually performed an assisted suicide on her mum... but, by then, Nanni is already implicated legally in the case and so he needs to somehow prove both their innocence. Before he can do that, however, Cinzia drives their car into oncoming traffic and Nanni dies (while Cinzia is injured badly and may or may not pull through). 

And it’s a slight story but it’s not about that. It’s about two absolutely blistering and well written performances of the male and female leads, some beautiful music and some absolutely fantastic shot compositions. Okay, so as to the performances... Philippe Leroy is absolutely amazing. He comes across at first as quite a timid character but he has a real strong and confident undercurrent... a real flesh and blood person brought to life with some amazing and subtle facial expressions which tell you everything about the mental state of the character in any specific shot. And he’s coupled with Paola Pitagora, who’s sensational in this and looks like Guido Crepax just drew her and she stepped out of one of his Valentina comics (in fact, why was this actress not tapped to play Valentina on film?). She’s breathtakingly gorgeous as the screwed up daughter who is completely confused by everything going on in the world around her and, honestly, I could just sit and watch these two actors chatting in character in a room or in a park for hours at a time. So I was kinda in luck when, it turns out, that a lot of the movie is... well, exactly that. 

And as for the cinematography. Wow. The director and camera guy do that thing where they use vertical lines found in the environments to split the shots into segments to place the actors in but, they have a beautiful twist on this approach because the verticals are usually sitting on an angle thrown out by the perspective over a distance, which gives it an even fresher and out of kilter feel. They tend to push the angles and the verticals quite a lot in the movie. For instance, a shot of the two protagonists in bed opens a scene and they are at an angle with various verticals either side of them... it’s only when they pan left to a more straight view of the scene that you realise you were looking at the scene in a huge refection in an angled mirror taking up the majority of the opening of the shot. 

Another great moment is when the two of them are talking in medium shot from opposite ends of a park bench angled slighty to the left and away in perspective from the camera. They are also sitting facing out from different sides of the bench... so you have Leroy sitting with his back mostly turned to us in the distance on the left of the screen and Pitagora in a more close up version with her face more or less angled towards the camera on the extreme right of the screen, which looks fantastic. And to top the shot off, there’s a vertical tree trunk in the background in the centre of the screen, splitting the two parts of the shot and giving each actor their own zone to perform in. It’s marvellous stuff. 

Even when he’s dealing with loads of people in a room, the director finds a way to make the compositions dynamic. For instance, when four people including Leroy are standing in a living room in a line as they are talking, three of them taking up the right three quarters of the screen are all in one depth while a fourth guy, taking up the left quarter, is more in close up and shaking a cocktail... it all just gives a visual richness to the shots which are among some of the best compositions I’ve seen (which seems to be a key thing with Italian film and their gialli in particular). 

The most clever thing he does, though, is to foreshadow the suicidal car crash of Cinzia at the tail end of the film. The audience is certainly aware from her body language and implied dialogue (not so, Nanni) that she is about to drive them both into oblivion when she asks if she can drive. We never see the car drive off and the accident is left entirely off screen other than a bit of the aftermath but as she goes to pull out, the next shot is a police car siren as it rushes to the presumed accident, the blaring, wailing sound acting as a surrogate for the shock of the unseen crash itself, and it’s brilliant... as the camera then cuts to a shot of Nanni’s lonesome hat and Cinzia’s abandoned handbag on the ground, thrown clear, somewhere away from the site of the wreck. 

And that’s it. Although it’s light on action I would recommend Without Knowing Anything About Her to pretty much anyone I know. It’s a gentle and romantic film with two amazing performances and with absolutely astounding cinematography and music. It’s a crime that this movie has never had a proper UK or USA release in this day and age and this absolutely needs a subtitled Blu Ray print to come on the market. What a brilliant film. You need to see this one. 

*Not that recent but, at time of writing, pre-pandemic.

Rupture

Cureless Rupture

Rupture
Canada/USA 2016
Directed by Steven Shainberg
Signature Entertainment

Warning: Slight spoilers here.

After my recent screening of slow burn Icelandic folk horror tale Lamb (reviewed by me here), I’d been reminded just how great the tough little Swedish actress Noomi Rapace is and I wanted to catch up on a few of her films I’d missed. So my first go to movie was a sci-fi/horror piece called Rupture from 2016 (not to be confused with two other films also called Rupture from 2021 and 2022... seriously, what is going on with movie titles these days people?). 

And, yeah, it’s got a strong start as Noomi plays Renee, a divorcee living in her home with her teenage son. And it soon becomes clear, as we see them interacting in their daily life, that they are being observed via hidden cameras in their house, recording loads of details about their personal lives. Then, when Renee has dropped the son off to her dad’s for the weekend, a device planted on the hub of her car causes a blowout and she’s abducted. Almost the entirety of the rest of the movie is her undergoing sinister and deliberately intimidating experiments while she tries to escape her captors and tries to find out why the other ‘test subjects’ in the facility are also being tormented by the things they fear the most (it’s set up early on in the narrative, during the opening, that Renee is afraid of spiders).  But it becomes increasingly clear that, while her captors are not extra-terrestrial in origin, they are far from human and she needs to figure out what’s going on before she finds herself joining their number.

And that’s as much of the plot as you’re going to get from me. It’s an interesting set up and it’s down completely to the way the material is approached as to the kind of movie it is. I mean, if Marvel tackled the same themes this would possibly be something like an X-Men movie but, instead, the writers and director of Rupture take a path not far from the full-on David Cronenberg body horror kind of movie... and it makes for an interesting take.

It’s also got a strong cast for this one too, with a somewhat unlikely mix of professional actors and actresses augmenting Rapace’s central, powerhouse performance. So people like Lesley Manville, Kerry Bishé, Michael Chiklis and Peter Stormare are some of the various bad guys and gals who work at the special facility. And, lets face it, when you see someone as ‘low key charismatic’ as Peter Stormare as a villain... well, you know you’re in trouble folks.

And yeah, I had quite a good time with this, in spite of the somewhat limited, claustrophobic location of the facility. It’s interesting that, while it’s a clinical place and various ‘medical horrors’ are being carried out on the ‘patients’ strapped down to the their gurneys... the lighting is all warm colours such as reds, pinks, oranges and yellows. So it makes for some nice environments to look at and, to boot, the colour scheme actually has a specific story beat to explain it... although why more is made of the obvious weakness of the ‘non-humans’ who work at the facility and the contradictory absence of this weakness in the last five minutes of the movie (despite an attempt at explaining that) is anybody’s guess.

It’s also full of some nice references, such as one of the walls of one of the many rooms of the facility using the exact same pattern as the carpet of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which was cool although, it has to be said, also very distracting from the on screen action when this element is brought in. It’s not exactly a subtle reveal. And, while the story is more about mutations from humans into something entirely different (it’s a bit like the origin story of Deadpool from the Marvel movie of the same name, if you think about it) and not about anything from any other planet, there’s a lovely punchline moment when you see that, any surviving subjects who fail to deliver the results the mutations are looking for (in their search for a cure to the condition of humanity), are delivered back into society, convinced they were the victims of an alien abduction. Which was a really nice touch, I thought. 

The finale of Rupture, which has a kind of unnecessary end sequence, is maybe a little weak in terms of effectively putting a full stop to the idea of the movie but, all in all I had an interesting time with this one and it almost has an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers kind of vibe to it, although in a more aggressive and closed up kind of manner, where fear and not sleep is the key to a human’s downfall. And, yeah, like I said, the acting is sensational, it all looks good and Nathan Larson’s chilling score effectively gels with the on screen visuals to push the atmosphere and bring it into the same level as the performances. 

So, if sci-fi horror is your jam, then you might want to give Rupture a shot. And, after all, you can never go completely wrong when you’ve got someone like Noomi Rapace headlining your movie. Although, it has to be said by me, as the son of a man who spent his working life in the heating and engineering trade, those air vents people like to crawl around in for escaping in movies really aren’t like that in real life... they’re too small, well secured and full of machinery. Please stop using these as a way of getting your characters in and out of situations writers... it’s just not, in any way, doable. Other than that... enjoy. 

Raffles

Cracks Lyrical

Raffles
USA 1930 
Directed by George Fitzmaurice 
& Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

and

Raffles
USA 1939 
Directed by Sam Wood & William Wyler
Sam Goldwyn Company
Warner Archives DVD Region 1

A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief and renowned cricketer, was created by E. W. Hornung (brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) in 1899 in a series of four books, most of which were his collected short stories about the character. Then, in 1903, he wrote a self contained play about the character called Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman. And it’s this play which both the first English friendly talking version of the film, Raffles in 1930 and its remake, also called Raffles in 1939, were based. 

This DVD set from Warner Archives in the US is fascinating because, it gives some insight, as you watch it, into how things can be both the same and quite different simultaneously. The story is identical for both... Raffles decides to give up his life as a gentleman thief to marry Gwen, the gal of his dreams. However, his best friend Bunny Manders is in debt and so Raffles decides to do one last job at a party of a well to do friend. Then, another thief gets intertwined in his shenanigans and eventually the chief inspector on the case, sets a thief to catch a thief... and finally gets Raffles to confess to the crime, once Manders has received the reward money. However, Raffles then does a runner and escapes the long arm of the law. 

So a very simple story and the first version of it stars Ronald Coleman in the title role with Kay Francis as Gwen and, with not too much screen time, Bramwell Fletcher as Bunny (Fletcher’s role in The Mummy, two years later and reviewed by me here, would be even shorter, as he goes mad once Karloff takes his first steps from his sarcophagus). The direction is pretty interesting and it speeds along at a nice pace, it has to be said. Coleman is somewhat thoughtful as Raffles and David Torrence as Inspector McKenzie gives him a good run for his money. 

There are some things which don’t go down quite right. It’s an American movie purporting to be set in England but, the party guests all drink brandy instead of port after dinner. Not really the done thing at the time... although brandy was also drunk after dinner by some. However, there’s some nice ‘screwball comedy’ moments such as a wonderful exchange between Raffles and McKenzie when McKenzie states that someone is ‘a’ something or other instead of ‘the’. Raffles questions, “A?” Mckenzie answers, “Aye!” and Raffles concludes the exchange with “Oh!”... which I thought was particularly good. The same A-I-O dialogue is almost repeated in the remake but, it’s a bit off... I’ll get to that in a minute because it’s reflective of the whole production. But I liked this version of the story well enough and was pleasantly entertained by it.

The 1939 remake, from which the film’s leading actor was given special extension of leave to finish before going off to the Second World War as a new recruit, is kind of a much polished version of the same story. And it’s interesting because the running time is exactly the same, 1 hour and 12 minutes long, but this much more sparkly ‘do over’ seems somehow duller and less pacier in comparison. The great David Niven plays Raffles and Gwen is played in this version by Olivia de Havilland. Lots of the stage direction is the same but characters are excised and replaced while situations bearing the same ultimate results are arrived at in different ways, where a lot of the fat is trimmed away from the same script (used as an initial starting point). It’s curious, then, just as to why this version, with far better acting and production values, seems a trifle dull in comparison to the original. 

A nice thing that demonstrates this is the ‘A-I-O’ joke from the earlier version. It’s almost the same dialogue exchange between Raffles and McKenzie but, for some reason, an extra line of dialogue is added after the “Aye!” before you get to the “Oh!”. Thus ruining the joke of three lines of dialogue each representing a vowel. Did the new script writers (one of them rumoured to be an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald) just not get the expedient joke?

Anyway, the second version is still highly watchable but, for my money, it’s the first, rawer Ronald Coleman version which comes out as the superior film. The pre-code ending where Raffles gets away with it is somewhat downplayed in the remake, when it’s intimated that the gentleman in question will be going to give himself up to the Inspector once the credits have rolled. Which I think says it all about how pre-code movies spoiled everyone’s fun. The two Raffles are available in the US on one DVD from the Warner Archives label, should you be tempted. 

Ballerina

In The Wick Of Time

Ballerina
aka From The World 
Of John Wick - Ballerina
Directed by Len Wiseman (and Chad Stahelski)
USA/Hungary 2025
Lionsgate
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Some spoilers of a sort.

After her big action sequence in the last James Bond movie (No Time To Die, reviewed here) which was, let’s be honest, the only good bit in that entire movie... it was inevitable that someone would have to give Ana de Armas a big action vehicle and, this ‘spin off’ set in ‘the world of John Wick’, called Ballerina, is it. And, I’m glad to report, it’s not the mess that some of its critics and its troubled shooting history would suggest it to be. I had a blast with it, in fact and the story has a very strong through line. Maybe some people just weren’t paying attention.

Okay, so this was never intended to be a John Wick adjacent movie when the script was first written but it was adapted and things were kinda shoehorned in (it does have some slight problems which I’ll get into later but they don’t really detract from the movie as a whole). And even when it was adapted, I don’t think John Wick was originally supposed to have been in it. From what I’m hearing, Len Wiseman’s original cut of the movie was considered a dud in some quarters and so original John Wick director Chad Stahelski had to jump on and do extensive reshoots... and I mean a lot of them from what I am hearing. Which explains a) why this has taken so long to come to screen from when I first heard about it and b) why Lance Reddick is in it as the concierge of The Continental once more... so this was actually his last screen role before his untimely death... along with Ian McShane’s Winston, of course. 

So this is a standard revenge movie with a couple of minor twists but mostly just long and pretty good action sequences. After her father is killed for reasons she’ll discover near the end of the movie, Ana de Armas’ character Eve (taking over from a minor role version of the same character played by someone else in one of the earlier movies) is trained by the branch of the High Table run by Angelica Houston (who gives the whole thing a little more gravitas). She then goes out as an assassin but, soon she gets wind of a path to vengeance and takes it, disrupting the truce between Houston’s people and a group of outsiders, who I’ll get to in a minute.

It’s action all the way including a final act (where she ends up meeting John Wick for a second time, as he’s sent out to stop her) which involves her inadvertently taking on a whole mountain village community who, it turns out, are all trained assassins, lead by the big bad of the movie, played by Gabriel Byrne. And everyone is great in this, especially de Armas. And a big shout out to From star Catalina Sandino Moreno as one of those assassins and also, as one of the concierges, Nikita herself, Anne Parillaud.

There are a couple of problems with, in my opinion, shoehorning in the John Wick stuff, as good as that stuff is. Firstly, his involvement in the final third of the movie didn’t, to me, make sense to where his character is at that point. He should be off the grid and resting up to take on the high table one last time, not working for Angelica Houston. This was all something which could have easily been solved just by setting it either earlier or even before the first couple of movies.

Secondly, the ‘cult’ of assassins, who have not been mentioned once in the series and who don’t play by the rules of the High Table (and yet have a truce with them) makes no sense in this as world building. The whole premise of the world in which these assassins operate revolves around the concept of ‘rules and consequences’... this bunch shouldn’t really be able to exist in this manner, it seems to me... when they are able to launch an attack on the ‘hallowed ground’ of The Continental. That should never happen in this world, surely?

Other than that though, Ana de Armas fighting her way through an entire village of enemies involving death by china plate, death by ice skates and a standout fight between a flame thrower and a water hose... well, it’s all good stuff although, those stunts looked really dangerous (there are a lot of burning people in this movie). But that’s me done with Ballerina... don’t let some of the negative reviews put you off. This one is a real crowd pleaser for the John Wick brigade and I certainly had a good time with it.  

Yellowjackets 3

 

Misty Meaner

Yellowjackets
USA February - April 2025
Series 3 Ten episodes

Warning: Spoilers below.

After the second series of Yellowjackets (reviewed here)... when one of my favourites of the adult characters of the two parallel stories, as played by Juliette Lewis, was accidentally killed by the adult version of Misty (played by Christina Ricci)... I didn’t think it had much story left to tell, to be honest. At least not enough to hold my attention.

However, as it happens, Yellowjackets Series 3 was a pretty cool one and maybe a little better than that second batch, to be fair. However, as gripped as I still am by the show, I do think the writers are maybe now spinning the story on a little longer than it has to go to naturally play out. The story once again progresses with the adult versions of the survivors of the Yellowjackets and their teen counterparts, still stuck in the wilderness in their Lord Of The Flies kind of existence, cross cutting and informing each other.

To help them with sustaining this, the writers have gone to picking on another of the teens who has actually been in it since season two (okay... I guess the survivors didn’t notice they’d grown another person or two) and once again brought the adult version of them into the story. 

This one had Melanie Lynskey once more trying to survive the ridiculous plots she gets into as an adult Shauna, trying to keep things together and de-escalate the effect of her daughter witnessing the death at the end of series two... but by the end of the series, she is much more reverting to the angry, strict and ruthless survivor version of her teenage self (played by Sophie Nélisse) as she pursues a ‘normal life’. Meanwhile, the others are also pitching in to try and find out who killed adult Lottie (played by Simone Kessell)... the second of three big adult character deaths in this series.

The third big adult death (but there are more), after gaining a sacrificial reprieve from her cancer, is the adult version of Van (played by Lauren Ambrose). Unlike last season, though, this actually happens in the penultimate episode, rather than act as the season finale, which goes in its own direction. As for the first adult death, this time around... I’ll leave you to discover it for yourself.

Okay, so one of my theories about either the teen or adult versions of the story line being a little fictional and spawned from the other is, I suspect, beginning to see the light of day here. For starters, the ghosts of the dead that show up don’t always have to be somebody else. It gets kind of complicated but, for instance, Van starts having visitations from her teen self and, when she is finally dead, she ends up on the same ethereal aircraft as some of the previous victims did when they died. 

Furthermore, when the teen version of Lotte somehow crosses time and wakes up her corpse version from the slab of the morgue, she takes her to the place where she meets that very death which got her there... which is a time conundrum but I’m not really sure the temporal mechanics of that kind of bootstrap paradox are necessarily something which needs to be taken into account here. I think a more obvious clue lays in what teen Travis (Kevin Alves) says about experiencing the action through different people’s versions of reality, which would make more sense with the dead people suddenly finding themselves turning up on an airplane watching events play out on some kind of TV. And especially since some of the characters have been experiencing interpenetrating dreams (or something like a dream) together when under the influence of a gas found in a cave.

I think this one does have a very specific endgame to it but what worries me is that the creators are planning for this one to end on series five. Which seems way too long for me but, even so, the fourth season hasn’t even started filming (the show was only renewed back in May of this year) so what we have here is the prospect of this next series not airing until late 2026 or perhaps even 2027 (ample time to forget everything again, then). And in the case of some of the ‘teens’ in the show, well... some of them will be nearer to, or even past, 30 years old when the show is finally over. Let’s see what happens next, I guess. 

The 6th Friend

 

A Friend In Bleed

The 6th Friend
USA 2016
Directed by Letia Clouston

Okay, so I started watching The 6th Friend as a recommendation from the Shockwaves podcast, which I’ve been listening to for a little while now.* I walked into this one thinking that it was going to be a horror movie but it’s not actually. What it is really is one of those slasher/thrillers which the Americans seem to do so much worse at than the Italians and, frankly, the genre is not one of my favourites (give me a giallo any day) but, having said that, this one plays really well. Of course, the title of the movie somewhat gives the obvious ‘twist reveal’ something of a shout out from the get go but, it’s not a film about surprises... it’s just a nicely, competently put together genre entry which has a certain charm about it compared to many.

So the film starts off with six friends... Joey (played by Jamie Bernadette), Chantelle (Melissa White), Heather (Dominique Swain), Katie (Jessica Morris), Sahara (Tania Nolan) and Becca (Monique Rosario). The girls are having a girly party night in and doing all the drinks etc. Then Becca’s ‘drug connection’ guy brings them all some drugs (I think it’s probably acid? I don’t know about this stuff) and the seven of them party. And then something happens which you don’t see on camera (until it’s revealed much later in the movie) but, you know the girls have got bloody and suffered through some kind of traumatic episode. 

Cut to five years later and one of girls brings the estranged Joey to a borrowed cabin in the woods, where the friends will try and patch things up, hopefully regain their old friendships and heal old wounds. Things don’t go as smoothly as planned though, as there are arguments and the girls all admit to seeing a certain dead person from that night when they are off guard. Then, one of the girls leaves and gets stabbed up by a psycho, who then starts to try and pick the girls off one by one in an affair that seems like a supernatural revenge killing at first. However, like I said, it’s not a horror film and only flirts with those genre tropes. I’m not going to describe the plot line anymore but that’s the set up.

There are a number of good things which make the film stand out though. One of which is the six actresses playing the friends, who seem to have good chemistry and, bearing in mind I’m male and not really privy to what goes on at a girly night out, the dialogue sounded pretty authentic to my ears.

Some of the lighting and shot designs are kinda cool too. There’s a lovely bit of set dressing on one of the bedrooms in the cabin which has unusual angles made by the sloping roof over it and they’ve dressed it so the wallpaper has vertical stripes, which of course accentuates these off kilter angles and makes the room, when filmed from certain positions, look like something out of The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari. So that was nice.

Oh, and the last thing I want to mention as a huge positive on what is turning out to be a very short review is the music composed by Holly Amber Church. It’s actually very much like the lower key moments of John Carpenter’s score for his own movie The Fog at various points and I felt really connected to this one. It raises the bar for this film because, often so many of these smaller films don’t have a good score to support and highlight the atmosphere but this one is pretty good (and it’s a shame there’s no CD release of it). 

There are also some slight negatives to the movie, such as how quickly the girls are scattered into individuals to allow themselves to get picked off rather than going for the whole safety in numbers bit but, it’s a means to an end to keep the movie going, I guess... so I can’t complain. The end twist also seemed a little unsatisfying because, like I said earlier, you can kind of see it coming and the little epilogue to the conclusion of the movie is nice but doesn’t really say a heck of a lot.

All that being said, though, I found The Sixth Friend to be a very entertaining watch and mostly had a good time with it. If you are into slasher type films then this would probably satisfy on ticking most of your slasher boxes and, like I said, the actresses are all pretty good and certainly easy on the eye. Definitely worth checking out one rainy evening when you’ve got nothing else on. 

*At time of writing, during the pandemic lockdown. It’s now been replaced by Colors Of The Dark (sic) podcast, which is also really great.

Magnificent Warriors

Fight Like A Gal

Magnificent Warriors
aka Dynamite Fighters
aka Zhong hua zhan shi
Hong Kong 1987
Directed by David Chung
D & B Films
Eureka Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve been quite taken with Michelle Yeoh, since seeing her at the cinema in 1997 as the new ‘Bond girl’ opposite Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here). I was aware even then that she was probably not used to letting other people perform her stunts, which she would have sorted out herself in many of these early Hong Kong movies but, as I watched her career with interest (and congratulations to her for winning the Oscar for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once - reviewed by me here), I’d never seen any of those pre-Bond roles. However, between them, British boutique labels such as Arrow Films, 88 Films and, in this case, Eureka Master of Cinema, have finally cottoned on that kung fu films will sell by the bucket load to English audiences, who have hitherto had to pursue bootleg recordings of a lot of these titles. Now, I had no idea which Michelle Yeoh movie I wanted to see first from her early career but then I saw a trailer for this release and realised, yeah, Magnificent Warriors was probably the one.

So, this is set in the 1930s and, I think it would be true that the influence of the then recent US blockbuster movies Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom are very much in evidence here. Michelle Yeoh had not made more than a handful of movies before this and not necessarily action based ones either, but here her training as a dancer and willingness to work hard pays off as she is, front and centre, the main protagonist of this one. Although she’s not an archeologist but a pilot in this. One might say she’s an anti-heroine because she’s also a gun runner, carrying arms in her biplane but, one has to take into account that the film is set historically during the Japanese invasion/occupation of China... so she is very much a resistance fighter, in some ways, to help stop her people being repressed.

And it’s the look and feel of her character which mostly distills the spirit of Indiana Jones more than anything else... as the film is obviously also influenced by various Hong Kong and Hollywood films before those, which also would have fed into the Spielberg films as much as they do here. So Yeoh’s character Ming-Ming wears the leather jacket and uses her bullwhip in ways much more interesting than her American visual counterpart. She really kicks backside in this movie and is especially good with a weapon which, being as ignorant in the art and instruments of war as I am, I can only describe as a pointy, dagger thing on a rope. Certainly, these must have been really intensive shoots (scheduled to their main locations for three weeks but actually taking three months, by all accounts) and the cast must have been left bruised and bloody after each day’s filming. When I watched the sequence where she was flicking the rope all around and spinning it over her head etc, it put me in mind of the same moves used by the Go Go Yubari character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One. Not saying he got that from here, by the way, I’m sure this choreography is not unique... just drawing the similarity to more widely seen films to aid the brevity of what kind of fighting moves you can see on display here.

And yeah, it’s a rip roaring movie with some good chemistry between all the lead protagonists such as Richard Ng, Tung-Shing Yee and Chindy Lau. There’s lots of humour thrown into the mix too, as Ming-Ming is tasked with rescuing a stranded secret agent who is, in turn, tasked with stopping the Japanese troops from taking over a village community and using the main building as a factory to manufacture their new poisonous gas... there’s even a scene which is reminiscent (or vice versa) of the ‘testing the gas’ scene in Patty Jenkin’s Wonder Woman movie (reviewed here).

Combine the humour and acting chops with a plot filled to the brim with action and not much room for anything else and, well, you’re definitely onto a winner with this particular audience member. I would have to say that the film’s main weakness might be that the action scenes don’t feel like they lead to a satisfying climax. There’s a long battle scene at the end which pitches the Japanese forces against the Chinese villagers defending their city and it’s certainly fine and explosive enough... but I felt the more interesting action sequences were the ones in the first half of the film, which concentrated on hand to hand combat. So, yeah, it felt a little anticlimactic to me. I was also... and this is no fault of the film... a little disappointed with the liner notes in the accompanying booklet (I should have perhaps waited for a cheaper reissue without the booklet and slipcase, I think). For example, the listing on the back makes great play of it having its original theatrical ending, not seen on home video before. But, there’s nowhere in the packaging that tells you what the difference was, where that ending starts from and why it was cut out. Absolutely no idea. It might be mentioned on one of the two commentary tracks on the disc but, yeah, I rarely have time to do the commentary tracks these days, it has to be said.

Anyway, it’s still a cracking little movie and the print and transfer on this are pretty good. I’ve not seen Magnificent Warriors before but I’ve no doubt this is probably the best way to see it. I really enjoyed this one and might look at seeing what other early Michelle Yeoh films I can get hold of at some point*.

*The writing of this review pre-dates my viewing of Yes, Madam (reviewed here) but I wanted to put this current batch of Hong Kong reviews into some kind of chronological order.